Writing in The New Republic, Michelle Cottle asks the sensible question, why do we expect professional athletes to be role models?

[…] what fascinates me isn’t why these spoiled, childish, overpaid celebrities insist on behaving so badly.(Answer: Because they are spoiled, childish, overpaid celebrities.) Rather, I can’t quite figure out why we still treat athletes in general as though they possess any character attributes that qualify them to serve as role models in the first place.

Sure, kids idolize pro athletes. There’s nothing we can do about that. But kids also idolize rock stars and movie stars. Yet no other brand of celebrity is automatically imbued with the strange moral authority that we adults bizarrely confer on pro athletes. No one expects Britney Spears or Justin Timberlake to be pillars of the community. (Could anything be more amusing than Winona Ryder’s shoplifting saga?) But we blather on and on about sports ‘heroes’ and assess nearly every big player to come down the pike in terms of what sort of message he will send young folks.

The media (like the leagues themselves) feed this tendency, running countless stories about the ‘good’ players who mentor troubled kids or donate to charities.

On the flip side, we fret over the popularity of self-styled bad boys like Iverson–and anxiously wonder what it portends that sales of his jersey spiked in the wake of his arrest. In the early ’90s, Charles Barkley was flat out vilified when he mouthed off in a Nike ad: “I am not paid to be a role model. I am paid to wreak havoc on a basketball court.” No, no, no! we shrieked in response. All athletes are role models, whether they like it or not.

But why? Why do adults seem just as desperate as kids to see pro athletes–more than any other type of celebrity in our fame-obsessed culture–as some sort of higher life form? It’s as though we retain some strange belief (perhaps left over from ancient Greece) that athletic prowess somehow relates to strength of character: external perfection as a reflection of internal worthiness. That, of course, is total hogwash–as we are painfully reminded every time Latrell Sprewell goes for his coach’s throat or John Rocker shows his true colors. As often as not, these clowns are big, dumb, coddled, selfish, self-indulgent, womanizing, violent head-cases with poor impulse control and bad hygiene. And until those of us old enough to know better stop putting sports stars on an ill-deserved pedestal, we don’t have any right to whinge about what sort of outsized influence they may be having on our kids.

Ms. Cottle is correct in a sense: plenty of pro athletes are nothing more than pampered bags of steroid-basted meat and muscle, and so are not especially worthy of praise. But because pro athletes represent their respective sports — and because the various professional leagues granted dominion over a sport hope to present their product as clean and wholesome competition worthy of emulation by children (however hard fought the individual games) — it is important for them to have athletes behaving properly and charitably.

Which is why it behooves them to sign athletes who behave properly and charitably as a rule, and to avoid signing athletes who don’t. It’s when pro teams try to have it both ways — marketing their sport as wholesome even while marquee representatives of the sport wield pistols and chuck chairs at restaurant patrons — that gives rise to public cynicism.